


Counting

by Tinfoil_soldiers



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Complete, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, I was in pain because of the season finale and this happened, I'm not sorry, Keith/Lance (Voltron) Angst, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Season 2 spoilers, Tags May Change, klance, my hand slipped, my red and blue sons, they deserve to be happy, whoops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-22
Updated: 2017-01-22
Packaged: 2018-09-19 03:36:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9416693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tinfoil_soldiers/pseuds/Tinfoil_soldiers
Summary: One.Two.Three.Four.Five.Ever since it happened Keith Kogane counted things in groups of five. Five seconds, five minutes, five hours, five days. Five concerned knocks on his door only to be met with harsh screams or silence. Five sleepless nights, ten skipped meals.Five, ten, fifteen groups of tallies and hash marks scratched above his bed posts by his own two sets of five fingers. Five times Keith Kogane sat on the end of his bed when he should have been sleeping and stared at them, at his cracked and broken fingernails.Five times Keith Kogane himself broke.Five times he curled in on himself, shaking and sobbing and unable to breathe even though all he wanted to do was breathe.Five times he told himself to breathe on the count of five.Four.Three.Two.One.





	

**Author's Note:**

> *SEASON TWO SPOILERS*  
> In case you couldn't tell, this is a Klance fic taking place post season two and is about how Keith copes with losing Shiro. This idea stemmed from a spur of the moment decision at midnight while I was thinking about how Keith might cope with losing the (presumably) only connection he had to who he is. This work may mention sensitive subjects for some people. This is also my first published work here, so go easy on me. 
> 
> Without further ado, please enjoy Counting, a Klance fanfiction.

In, out. That was all he had to do. Breathe in, breathe out. It was easy. It was supposed to be easy. But if things like this were supposed to be easy then why was it so goddamn _hard?_ Why was it so hard to get his lungs to expand and contract at a steadier pace, actually take in the oxygen he needed before passing out. Why was it so hard? Why was coping so hard? Losing the one thing he knew he could count on, the one thing that was firm and solid as a rock in his hectic life as a paladin, in his hectic life as Keith was so hard. Losing Shiro was hard. Keith knew the pain of it all too well.

It had been seventy-five days since he last saw Shiro. Seventy-five days since he lost what was holding him together. It seemed to Keith like seventy-five was a much bigger number now that he was living it. Living his life five seconds at a time, five hours at a time. And even though the groups were bunched together to fit evenly into seventy-five consecutive days, they passed by agonizingly slowly.  
Too slowly.  
He was breathing too slowly. He’d managed to occupy his mind long enough to get his breathing back to normal, if not a little slower than normal. It was funny, the way his brain worked. How the same thing that could make it reel and think at the speed of sound could also bring it to a screeching halt. Shiro was funny like that. He’d make your brain work a million miles a second one moment and then make it go numbingly empty the next. Even when he was nowhere near you.

Keith forced away the sudden intrusive thought of Shiro being taken by the Galra, being tortured slowly and endlessly. He pushed away the thought of his face, contorted in pain, his screams echoing around the room he was being held in. He pushed away the thought of the one person he knew he could trust, the person he knew he could let his guard down with meeting a fate so bad he was begging for death.

Not for the first time, Keith felt helpless. He felt useless. Like no matter what he did he would never get Shiro back from wherever in the endless universe he was. That is, if he was there at all. For the hundredth time that night he sat on his pillow and reached behind him. He felt the faint marks in the wall under his fingers and wondered half-heartedly what Allura would say about him ruining the castle walls. He smiled despite himself, imagining her blowing a fuse at the tiny, faint scratches he put there to count the days as they passed. He wondered what Shiro would think.

As abruptly as the thought had started it stopped. Keith needed a distraction. He wondered for a moment if waking Lance would be a good idea and then decided immediately against it. Lance needed to rest. They all did. And yet here he was, awake for what he guessed was hours now trying to make himself forget everything. He ran a hand through his hair, feeling himself shake. He wanted to go home. The mighty Keith Kogane, stubborn and snappy and only slightly obnoxiously good at what he did wanted nothing more than to go home. In that moment he decided what he would do.

He didn’t bother changing. He hadn’t in days anyway. He shuffled down the hallways of the castle, hands tracing lines on the walls. Soon he found himself standing in the bridge, fidgeting with the gadgets he thought would do what he wanted. He counted. One, two, three, four, five. Five tries. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten minutes of messing around and trying to pull up the stupid map. Eleven and he started to get tired of waiting. Twelve and he started tugging nervously at his sleeve. Thirteen and his thoughts started wandering. Fourteen and he felt like he was losing himself. Fifteen and he swung his arms out in frustration, desperate for some sort of peace.

He must have hit something, made a certain gesture, something to make the hologram finally appear around him, engulfing him in a map of stars and planets. He nearly jumped out of his skin. Spinning on his heel he stared. Nothing but planets. Galaxies and galaxies of stars upon stars and planets upon planets, so many Keith didn’t know where Earth was. He tried to find something familiar, a constellation maybe. Nothing. He swiped and swiped at the hologram to get it to move in the hopes that maybe he’d spot something. He didn’t know exactly what gave it away but soon he was zooming in on a tiny planet of blue, speckled with green and streaked with white clouds.  
His head started to spin. Seeing his home from so far away, not anywhere near where he felt in that moment he should be was terrifying. It was then that Keith realized he was scared. Scared of never being able to go home, scared of never seeing Shiro again, scared he’d have to take up the role of the black paladin even though he was certain that he couldn’t do it. Scared that if he did he’d let the whole team down. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew that he’d already let the whole team down.

He didn’t notice his vision blurring as tears welled up in his eyes and he definitely didn’t notice the tiny, helpless noise he made in the back of his throat as he felt his chest tighten. For the hundredth time that night, Keith forgot how to breathe. He forgot how to move. He forgot everything he had ever known except for the fact that Shiro was gone and he was helpless and useless and nothing without him. He wrapped his arms around himself as he stood there, staring at his feet and choking back sobs. He shook his head and furiously blinked away the endless stream of tears. He tried to stop the sudden rush of horrible mental images that wormed their way into his brain and he couldn’t help but visualize his worst fears.

He scrubbed at his eyes with the backs of his hands when he heard the door behind him open. He heard a voice, soft and laced with sleep. Familiar and foreign and comforting and unsettling all at the same time.

“Keith?”

Lance’s voice was tiny and almost too quiet to hear against Keith’s own laboured breathing. He waved a hand in dismissal. He could feel Lance’s eyes glued to the back of his head and he could hear the soft padding of his stupid blue lion slippers on the floor. “Keith, buddy… are you crying?” Lance trailed off as he stepped in front of Keith and saw his face. It was flushed and his cheeks still had tears rolling down them, catching on his jaw and dripping to the floor. Keith avoided looking Lance in the eye, even when he was grabbed by the chin and forced to look up. He said nothing. He was too tired. Too weak.

Lance didn’t speak either. Truth be told, he didn’t think he could. He’d seen Keith get upset, he’d seen Keith get mad. But he’d never seen Keith look so tired, so helpless, so… broken. He looked so broken. 

Keith didn’t have the energy to fight it when Lance pulled him into a hug. He didn’t have the energy to reject when he felt Lance rub slow circles in the centre of his back. He let his forehead fall onto Lance’s shoulder, let himself shake and be held still, let his knees go weak, he let himself fall apart. And then he started counting.  
He counted in fives, visualizing the groups in his head. He counted how long Lance held him. Counted how long he stood on his own before finally leaning on lance for support. He counted how many sobs racked his body and made his throat sore, how many times he weakly called out for someone he knew couldn’t hear him. Keith counted. He counted everything he could count, grouping them in his head into groups of five. He wondered absently if Lance could hear him whispering to himself. 

One hundred and fifty seconds. It took Keith one hundred and fifty seconds, thirty repeating groups of five to completely fall apart in Lance’s arms. His knees gave out and he let out a horrible quiet cry that had Lance stumbling to catch him and it made his chest tighten. It took him longer to register that he had sunken to the floor with Lance. He’d curled in on himself but that hadn’t stopped Lance from pulling him into his lap and holding him as close as he could get. Keith noticed that he was warm. He felt his days of never sleeping and never eating finally weighing down on him.

Lance noticed that Keith was pale. He was pale and he could see his bones so clearly through his skin he wasn’t sure how Keith wasn’t dead yet. He pulled him closer. He pulled him closer and rested his chin on top of his head, unsure of how to stop Keith’s shaking. He settled for talking. Talking slowly, quietly, telling Keith that it was all okay. That he’d be okay. He ignored the weak shaking of Keith’s head as he talked.

Keith couldn’t understand why Lance was doing this. Why he’d found him and his first instinct was to hold him or why he felt somehow a little safer. He hardly heard lance talking lowly to him, telling him that he’d be fine. He shook his head.

They sat there for what felt to Lance like forever but was to Keith only six hundred seconds. And in those six hundred seconds Keith felt himself go limp, felt himself finally getting endlessly, painfully tired. He listened to Lance talk about nothing the entire time.

It took Keith another hundred seconds to let his eyes fall closed and another ten for Lance to see that Keith’s breathing was finally slowing down. It took another nine hundred seconds to get Keith to his room and two for lance to decide that he would stay with him tonight. So Lance lay Keith down, muscles aching and heart hurting. 

It took Lance one thousand, eight hundred seconds to succumb to sleep too.


End file.
